Lentils that go a long way

I always make a big batch of this delicious recipe for lentils, because they can be used for 2 more dinners afterwards. They are themselves creamy and delicious – serve them with rice, couscous, polenta or with cornbread. Then, when combined with rice and ground hazelnuts, they become a fantastic loaf when baked. Finally, the loaf can be sliced the next day and sautéed to achieve a crispy surface, and can be eaten as-is or as a burger. Lots of return for not much work!

Creamy French Lentils
1 cup Puy (small olive/black) lentils
2 medium carrots, finely diced
2 stalks celery, finely diced
½ onion, finely diced
1 tsp. cumin seeds (or ½ tsp. ground dried cumin)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. dried basil
1 tsp. curry powder
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
3 cups chicken stock or water

Sauté carrot, celery and onion in a bit of olive oil for about 10 minutes, until they soften and melt down a bit. Add the garlic, cumin and basil and cook another 2 minutes, with stirring.

Add the lentils, curry powder and chicken stock and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer, cover and cook for 30-45 minutes, until lentils are just soft. Stir occasionally. Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve over whole grain, with cornbread or beside grilled meat or fish.


Lentil Hazelnut Loaf
2 cups cooked lentils (see Creamy French Lentils, above)
2 cups cooked rice
½ cup hazelnuts, ground to a coarse meal
2 eggs, beaten
¼ cup Romano (or Parmesan) cheese, grated
¼ tsp. ground coriander
5 oz. sharp cheddar cheese, grated
2 Tbsp sesame seeds

Preheat oven to 375F. Mix together all ingredients, reserving about an ounce of the cheese and ½ tablespoon of sesame seeds. Pour into an oiled loaf pan. Top with the remaining cheese and sesame seeds. Cover and bake for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake an additional 15 minutes. Slice and serve with your favorite sauce.

Can be sliced the next day and reheated with a bit of olive oil in a non-stick skillet until a bit browned. Eat as is or as a burger in a bun.

Paris - The City of Lights

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Beans and Rice – variations on a satisfying theme

Beans go together with rice so well that this combination is almost as old as time. The variations are endless – Asian, Latin American, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern – you’ll find variations in many, many cuisines. The amino acid content of rice and beans combine to produce complete protein; that’s why these dishes are so satisfying. Beans and rice are no wimpy vegetarian alternatives to meat – they pack power and have fueled generations with their energy, healthy fiber, low fat and firm toothy feel.

White Beans and Rice with Leek and Cauliflower
2 cups water
½ tsp salt
1 cup Jasmine rice plus 1 Tbsp bulgur
1 large or 2 small leek, cleaned and diced
2 carrots, peeled and finely diced
3 celery sticks, finely diced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 can Navy beans, rinsed and drained
¼ cup chicken stock or broth
palmful of fresh parsley, minced

Bring water to boil in a small pot. Add salt rice and bulgur, return to boil, reduce to simmer and cover for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, sauté the carrot and celery in a bit of olive oil until the vegetables begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Add the leek and garlic and continue cooking another 5 minutes. Add cauliflower, beans and broth, and cook another 5 minutes. Fold vegetables together with the cooked rice and parsley.

Japanese Red Beans and Rice
1 cup white long grain rice
2 cups water
1 onion, diced
2 stalks celery, sliced on diagonal
1 Tbsp corn oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
½ inch piece fresh ginger, minced
1 can pink beans, rinsed and drained
2 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp sesame oil
3-4 dashes Tabasco sauce

Bring water to boil. Stir in rice, turn to low and cover for 20 minutes. Sauté onion and celery in oil until beginning to soften, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and ginger and cook another few minutes, until very fragrant. Add beans, sesame oil, soy sauce and Tabasco to vegetables, and keep warm until rice is done, stirring beans occasionally. When rice is cooked, turn into large bowl and gently fold in with the beans.

Back Home to Buttermilk Pancakes

Each time our kids come home from school I hear the same request – “Pancakes, please!” These are really something to come home to.

Apple Buttermilk Pancakes
Dry ingredients:
1 cup white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 Tbsp brown sugar

Wet ingredients:
3 eggs
3 cups buttermilk
4 Tbsp melted butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 apple, peeled, cored and finely diced

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a separate bowl beat together the eggs and add the remaining wet ingredients. Preheat a large non-stick griddle or pan to low – give this time so that the whole griddle has become evenly hot. Pay attention to your griddle temperature – you want it hot enough to generate bubbles in the pancakes, but not too hot to over-brown the first side.

Fold the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Ladle batter into oiled griddle. Cook only until you see the edges of the pancake become well defined and a few bubbles appear in the batter. Flip and cook another 30-60 seconds. Remove to a plate kept in a warm 125˚F oven while you finish the remaining pancakes – or serve them to a hungry crowd as fast as you can make them!

More fun: Sprinkle chocolate chips onto the batter of the pancake immediately after pouring onto the griddle for chocoholics at the table. Or blueberries. Or raspberries. Or whatever.

Apple Fruit Tart

3 Tbsp butter
4 small-medium apples
½ cup mixed frozen berries
2 Tbsp brown sugar

½ pie crust (store bought, or see Thanksgiving pie crust)

Preheat oven to 350F. Sauté the apples in the butter for about 5 minutes. Add the berries and sugar, and continue cooking until most of the liquid has evaporated – about another 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, roll out dough and press into a low spring-form tart pan. Trim remaining dough and reserve for decorative pieces on top of tart. When fruit is cooked, pour into dough in tart pan. Cover with decorative dough pieces. Bake for about 20-30 minutes, until top dough pieces are nicely browned.

Mussels Many Ways

Mussels with Salmon in a Lemon Primavera Sauce
1 lemon, jest removed and reserved
4 Tbsp butter
1 carrot, cut into small fine julienne
1 onion, finely diced
1 celery, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, finely sliced
2 lbs mussels in shells
½ cup dry white wine
½ cup chicken stock
1 lb salmon fillet, skinned and diced into ½ inch cubes
palmful of fresh parsley, minced

Juice the lemon and reserve juice. Dice the lemon rind into ½ inch pieces and reserve. In a large, deep skillet, sauté the onion, celery and carrot in the butter until onions soften. Add garlic and cook another 2 minutes until fragrant. Salt and pepper to taste.

Add the mussels, wine and stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer, cover and cook for 2-3 minutes until mussels begin to open. Scatter salmon on top of mussels, and top with parsley and lemon rind. Pour in the lemon juice, cover and cook another 2-3 minutes until salmon is cooked through. Serve in bowls, topped with the lemon jest along with bread or focaccia. Alternatively, you can serve on top of linguine or other pasta.

Mussels with Scallops and White Wine
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Focaccia

Focaccia is fast, and is a great complement to soups or dishes with a sauce. This recipe is essentially the same I use for pizza dough. You can put herbs and spices right in the dough to flavor pizza or focaccia doughs. Think olive, garlic, rosemary; think Mediterranean.

Wheat Bran, Garlic and Oregano Focaccia
4 cups bread flour
2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp breadmaker granulated active dry yeast
2 Tbsp. wheat bran
1 tsp dried oregano (or other spice)
1 Tbsp minced garlic
1½ cup very warm water
1 Tbsp olive oil

In a mixer fitted with a dough hook and set on medium, mix together the first seven ingredients. Add the water and then the olive oil. Allow the dough to form a ball that has taken up all the flour. At that point, knead on medium-slow speed for 5 minutes. Place 1-tablespoon olive oil in a large bowl. Form dough into a ball and turn into the bowl. Roll dough ball around to assure all surfaces are coated and cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let sit about 1-2 hours in the kitchen. I don’t find that a ‘warm, dry’ spot is necessarily needed, depending on the season. I have never had a problem simply placing the bowl on the counter top and walking away – and we live in New England! But if it is exceptionally cold, just put your bowl in a warmed oven (turned off of course!). After dough has doubled to tripled in volume, turn it out to a greased jelly roll pan or a pizza pan. Spread dough out with your fingers to about ¼ to ½ inch thick. Let rise to about ¾ to an inch thick, another 30 minutes or so. Preheat oven to 425F.

Then punch small holes in the dough with all fingers (as if you were playing the piano) and brush olive oil liberally all over the surface (this gives the foccaccia a nice brown crust). Sprinkle coarse salt, fresh ground pepper and whatever dried herbs you want (rosemary for example) over the surface. Bake for about 10-15 minutes, until golden brown.

So Much Stirring, So Much Chopping, So much Flavor!

Cooking Indian with Padmaja from Mumbai - UNDER CONSTRUCTION

OMG There’s a Lobster Loose!

Growing up, we used to be able to choose the dinner the family would have on our birthday. With six kids in our family, we ate a lot of lobster! The standard dish was boiled lobster with drawn butter – something we continue to enjoy today with our children. Our daughter and I continue the birthday (and sometimes more often!) lobster tradition, but after a while you can yearn for something more than just plain boiled lobster.

The problem is, lobsters come home alive. And if they don’t get loose (see Woody Allen’s Annie Hall for details), one way or another you have to ‘dispatch’ the lobster before cooking or eating [‘dispatch’ is a euphemism used in cookbooks for kill]. It’s easiest to toss the live lobster in a pot of boiling water, but if you want to bake the lobster, you’ll have to take matters into your own hands; and I can only urge you to learn the correct way to ‘dispatch’ a lobster – for everybody’s sake.

If you can handle it, baking a lobster with butter, or stuffed with, say a crabmeat stuffing, is well worth the extra work.

Either way – for goodness sake, save the shells. You can make an outstanding bisque with them, doubling the fun for all the money you spent on the lobster. Even if you don’t have any lobster meat left, just add a few shrimp into the recipe and you’re all set.


Lobster Baked with Capers, Leeks, Lemons and Limes
2 chick (1½ -2 lb) lobsters
2 leeks, (mostly white –some green stalk), cleaned, drained and diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
¼ tsp red pepper flakes
2 tsp capers
2 Tbsp fresh parsley, minced
½ cup chicken stock or clam broth
½ cup white wine
4 oz whipped butter
2 lemons
1 lime

The hard part: Dispatch (kill…) the lobsters in a humane fashion with a sharp knife quickly inserted in the back of the head to sever the spine instantaneously – if you are unfamiliar with this technique it is worth reading up on it in cookbooks, or the web – please do; I don’t do it justice here and it is not for the faint of heart… Slice the lobsters in half, and clean out the tamale, gravel sac and intestinal vein (or shmooze with your fish monger to do this for you!). Place lobsters halves in a large oiled roasting pan, alternating head and tail.

The fun part: Preheat oven to 400F. In a large skillet, sauté the leeks in a bit of olive oil over medium heat for about 10 minutes until the leeks begin to brown. Add the garlic and red pepper flakes and continue cooking another few minutes until very fragrant. Add the capers and parsley and stir to combine. Spoon leek mixture evenly on top of lobsters. Juice the lemons and the limes, discard the seeds, and pour the juices over the lobsters. Cut the lemon and lime rinds up into ½ to ¾-inch pieces. Toss over lobsters. Salt and pepper to taste.

Meanwhile prepare the sauce by simmering the broth and the wine. Whisk in the butter. Whipped butter holds an emulsion much better than regular butter and makes a really nice smooth sauce. Pour over the lobsters evenly. Bake for about 25-30 minutes. Serve lobsters over linguine for a fine presentation.


Rich Lobster Bisque
Shells from 3 to 4 cooked lobsters, broken up
Shells from ½ lb. shrimp

3 Tbsp olive oil
3 Tbsp butter
2 Tbsp tomato paste
1 onion, quartered, skin included
2 carrots, peeled and coarsely
2 stalks celery, coarsely chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
¼ cup cream sherry
meat from one lobster
½ lb shelled shrimp cut into ½-inch pieces

For stock – sear shells, onion, carrot and celery in a bit of olive oil in a large pot for about 15 minutes. Add 6-8 cups water just to cover shells and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 45 minutes. Strain through a soup sieve.

Whisk together the cream sherry and the tomato paste. Tip stock into a soup pot and add cream sherry, and tomato paste along with the lobster meat and shrimp. Simmer just enough to cook shrimp through, about 3-5 minutes.

Healthy Muffins – an Oxymoron?

These are outrageously delicious – and at least they have some redeeming qualities…

Banana Bran Peanut Butter and White Chocolate Muffins
Dry:
2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup wheat bran
¾ cup brown sugar
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
¾ cup white chocolate morsels

Wet:
2 large ripe bananas, mashed
¼ cup chunky peanut butter
1/3 cup canola oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 Tbsp molasses
1 cup milk

Preheat oven to 375F. Prepare the dry and wet ingredients in separate bowls. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and fold just to mix. Spoon into muffin tins sprayed with oil. Bake 23-25 minutes.

Apple Bran Carrot Muffins
Dry:
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ cup wheat bran
¾ cup brown sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp powdered ginger
1 tsp salt
½ cup shredded coconut

Wet:
1 cup apple sauce
1 cup finely grated carrots (about 2 carrots)
1 cup milk (or apple cider, or a mix of the two)
1/3 cup canola oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 Tbsp molasses

Preheat oven to 375F. Prepare the dry and wet ingredients in separate bowls. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and fold just to mix. Spoon into muffin tins sprayed with oil. Bake 23-25 minutes.